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About

Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Yesterday's teaser turned out to be fairly easy to guess in the end - the passage featured there is from Hermann Hesse's Demian, translated into Sambahsa (by Olivier Simon of course, not me). He sent me an email informing me of the translation yesterday, asking that it be uploaded to Scribd on my end for copyright reasons (Canada = death + 50 years, Europe = death + 70 years), so here it is:

Phu ! What a work ! Fortunately, your interlinear translation was very helpful to me.

Olivier is already fluent in German, but an interlinear translation (link to mine for anyone who has yet to see it) certainly is a great aid in translation as fluency in a language does not necessarily equate to always being able to come up with an apt translation for each and every word one hears. In addition to that, most of the material for Sambahsa (dictionaries and learning materials) is in French and English.

One more note from his next email that I will include verbatim (emphasis mine):

Indeed, "Demian" must be the longest piece of Sambahsa translation ever done. As you'll consecrate a full post to it, then you shall add the link to the 3 Goldendict versions :

Yesterday evening, thanks to a software that R.Winter had recommended to me, I could check the 100 most common words in Demian and saw that only less than 10 were missing in the Goldendict. Such translations help me to enrich the wordstock of Sambahsa, but I must say that I find always less and less words.

Since this is the longest translation ever done in Sambahsa it makes sense to provide a paper version as well (also on Lulu), which I'm working on at the moment. This will be a much easier process than the book I created as there is no fiddling around with lines being pushed into the next page by whatever quirk of the system in Lulu caused them to not quite fit on the page in the way I intended. The paper version will probably be pocket book size (5.5" x 8.5") and end up being just under 200 pages.

Thanks to the time it took to create my translation and the familiarity I now have with the book as a result, this book is probably the best language primer I could have for learning Sambahsa.